


Love You Much Better

by AndreaLyn



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-16
Updated: 2011-03-16
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:06:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thanks to Yusuf, Arthur's new job has become 'make sure Eames doesn't cause a riot'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love You Much Better

It begins when Eames sits up from one of Yusuf’s drug trials, and pries the line from his arm.

He takes one long look at Yusuf, sprawls sideways in order to pluck up an abused pack of cigarettes that he’s been toting around for ages and turns puppy-dog eyes on Arthur for a light. Apparently, while Eames is the only regular smoker of the group, Arthur is expected to carry the lighter.

The trouble starts when he opens his mouth. “Thank you much, darling.”

Arthur, who has been trained to notice everything, does not miss the way Yusuf suddenly grows very interested in what Eames has to say. His posture straightens, his eyes skid away from the notes he’s taking and he begins to stare at Eames’ mouth like it’s the second coming – or like he’d like it to be doing a little coming first.

It gets stranger when suddenly Yusuf is on Eames, prying the cigarette from his mouth and replacing it with his lips.

At first, Arthur has only the jealousy in his own stomach to think about, mentally muttering on about how Eames shouldn’t be kissing other people, but Eames lived in Mombasa for a good while and who _knows_ what kind of history he and Yusuf have? This is the reasoning that Arthur is going to hide behind when Eames later asks why he didn’t do something sooner.

As it is, Arthur is busy trying to dissuade away the good sense trying to tell him to just walk away – or to fight for the man he might, possibly, could, just maybe love – when he sees Eames’ hand pounding on the sofa rather forcefully, a muffled sound coming from his mouth that’s anything but pleasure.

Arthur balances the mix of joyous relief and aggravated frustration with ease, already across the room to grasp at Yusuf’s curls and haul him off Eames enough to let the other man breathe.

“I know I’m attractive,” Eames breathlessly pants. “But Yusuf,” he whines, “that’s a bit far. Tongue,” he says with a petrified and rather terrified look on his face. He uses the small space between them to scramble out and fix his clothes. He plucks up the mangled cigarette pack and hides behind Arthur, standing just slightly too close for comfort, what with the way that Arthur can feel Eames’ breath on his neck.

It means that the proximity of their bodies is actually a bit scary – maybe only for Arthur – because it means that if he inches back only slightly, they’ll be in contact and Arthur’s not sure how good he’ll be with his restraint in that situation.

“Yusuf,” Arthur commands, reaching a hand back to rest at Eames’ hip in order to protect him. Only, he miscalculates and ends up brushing his hand against what appears to be Eames at half-mast. His cheeks flare furiously red and he tightens his grip on Eames’ hip. “Are you done with your tests?” Yusuf doesn’t even seem to _hear_ him, so intent on staring at Eames. “ **Yusuf**!”

Finally, he pinches Eames’ hip, giving him lines in this play. “Yusuf,” Eames drawls, making his voice sound like honey and Arthur doesn’t bother to hide how disgruntled this makes him. “Did you get what you needed?”

“No,” Yusuf protests.

“We’ll run it again until you…”

“Because that bastard has you.”

Arthur silently counts to ten, reminds himself that he cannot shoot Yusuf in reality and grabs Eames’ hip just a bit harder to prevent him from moving and giving Yusuf even the tiniest sliver of hope.

*

When Ariadne joins them for their next research session, Arthur watches her almost obsessively as if waiting for signs that her brain is about to hemorrhage in Eames’ presence. So far, nothing’s gone awry. Ariadne is sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a low table piecing together a maze and Eames is sprawled on the sofa reading information about the mark.

Maybe Yusuf was just a very strange anomaly. Maybe Yusuf had been playing around with his chemicals and one of them caused some kind of _event_ in his brain that can’t be explained.

Arthur is almost ready to relax when suddenly Eames looks up and catches Ariadne’s eye, flashing the papers about. “Is this bloke really this enamored with the notion of oscillatory fans as kinetic energy?” he murmurs.

Suddenly, Ariadne seems _very_ interested.

The mazes are swiped aside and she leans forward, palms sliding across the wooden table as she pushes up against the table, her spine curving as she gets onto her knees and stares at Eames.

“Say it again,” she demands.

“What?” Eames laughs and stares at her from around the margin of the page. “Kinetic? Oscillatory?”

Arthur feels like he’s bound to have a heart attack or maybe just a stroke. Either way, something is going to happen because he’s not sure he’s ever wanted to see Ariadne start clambering up a table on hands and knees to get closer to Eames, let alone breathing that hard. “Again, Eames,” she begs. “Say it again.”

“Kinetic,” Eames replies, looking confused and vaguely alarmed. “Oscill…” he pauses, wets his lower lip, and draws in a breath and even Arthur is starting to feel somewhat disturbed by the fact that his blood is waging a war on whether to rush to his cheeks or to his dick. “…atory? What’s so damn interesting about those ridiculous little words?” he asks and punctuates every last syllable in ‘ridiculous’ that it sends a bolt of desire through _Arthur_ , let alone Ariadne – who is across the table now, climbing into Eames’ lap and Arthur feels like this is his moment to intrude.

“Again,” she murmurs, face already pressed to his neck, nuzzling and biting. “Don’t ever stop.”

It does cause Eames to yelp quite loudly. “Architect attack!” he cries out, even as Arthur pries Ariadne off of Eames, wrapping his arms tightly around her torso to bind her in. “Architect teeth _on my_ neck! Is she going to bite me, Arthur, is she going to turn me into an architect? I don’t want to know that much about angles and I don’t want to drink ink to live!”

“I’ve got her, Eames! Now go away,” Arthur commands, not adding the _before you cause any more trouble_ because that sort of thing is implicit in all words spoken in Eames’ direction. He _does not_ eye Eames’ ass as he goes and the minute he’s out of the room, Ariadne calms in his arms and turns to look at him with one eyebrow cocked upwards in worry.

He lets her go tentatively, still half-expecting her to go chasing after Eames with desperation. “Personal space?” she scoffs out.

Arthur blinks at her, trying to figure out exactly how to counter that without pissing her off completely. He lets it go for the moment and decides that if she isn’t about to tie him to a chair and go chasing after Eames, they’re okay.

He gets a flash of an image of Eames with a hickey on his neck from Ariadne and tells the tumultuous ache in his stomach to shut up before he can acknowledge it as jealousy.

*

Arthur has come around to the fact that something must be going on. Every time Eames opens his mouth, he is immediately swarmed with male and female attention. As opposed to a projection’s need to attack the dreamer when changes are made, Eames seems only to beckon forth people with an intense desire to shower Eames with physical and romantic affection.

They’ve been at the coffee shop for exactly ten minutes and Eames has had five marriage proposals, two offers to have sex in the bathroom stall of the little shop, and has accumulated three red roses, six cups of coffee, and five lipstick marks on his cheek – one of them not from a woman.

Arthur decides that this is _enough_.

“Something is wrong,” he announces, when Eames is offered a baby from a young woman, requesting that he be the father.

“Oh, good,” Eames exhales his relief. “I’m glad someone else noticed.” He smiles winningly at the young woman and hands the child back. “I’d love to,” he says very seriously, wrapping his arm around Arthur. “But I was cursed at a young age by a witch that said that I would never be a father and I do believe in magic.”

They manage to escape, but not before Eames is asked whether he also believes in love at first sight.

He takes a moment to answer, staring at Arthur considerately. “I don’t know, he _was_ wielding a gun at the time. First sight plus ten minutes, maybe.”

They’re not mobbed when they leave and for that, Arthur is thankful.

“You’re red as a tomato. Embarrassed, darling?” asks Eames when he notices the flush in Arthur’s cheeks. He’s not so thankful for that.

“It’s just the heat,” he protests, walking away from Eames before he can pester further about the fact that Arthur sheathing his gun and pinning Eames to the wall in a dreamscape is somehow love at first sight plus ten minutes. “And stop joking around,” he mutters scathingly. “We have a problem to solve.”

*

Arthur realizes that something is _very_ wrong when he is physically bracing Cobb back and trying to keep him away. He doesn’t have Cobb’s broadness and so this is a losing battle with Arthur’s feet struggling to keep ground and Cobb pushing on forward. Eames is behind them, inching backwards and protesting that ‘how was he to know, all I did was say good morning and would he like to make it better, it was supposed to be a cute joke’.

Arthur snaps back, “did you have to say it in _French_?”

“Eames,” Cobb is begging, desperate as anything. “Eames, please,” he gets out, pushing forward as Arthur loses another two feet of ground. “We can be together. We’ll take a holiday in Monte Carlo, I’ll get you anything you need, I’ll let you steal anything you want and I’ll give it to you twice-over. Please, Eames…”

“Eames, if you don’t run now, Cobb is going to be on you in about three seconds,” Arthur warns.

“Marry me, Eames! The kids already love you!”

*

Arthur used to grind his teeth as a child. When he was stressed, he would go to bed and the awful sound would permeate the room as he spent his sleeping hours lost in dreams. It’s a habit that he’s mostly stopped as an adult, but for situations in which his emotions grow so tense and upset that he can’t help himself.

The warehouse is currently filled with the sound of tooth on tooth.

Saito has arrived for a visit and the moment Eames opened his mouth to greet him, Saito has done nothing but be the _perfect_ gentleman. He’s pulled Eames’ chair out for him and fed him dinner. He even used the handkerchief perfectly folded in his suit pocket to dab away at a stain of tomato sauce on Eames’ cheek.

And from what Arthur can hear, Saito is currently propositioning Eames with a _small country off the coast of France_. “It’s not much,” Saito murmurs, rubbing his thumb over Eames’ knuckles, “but I would have a casino built and a mansion with as many mirrors as you would like.”

Maybe Arthur wouldn’t be so furious if Eames wasn’t considering it.

The grinding sound increases to the point that Eames notices that they aren’t alone in the warehouse. He almost looks startled to see Arthur is still there and they share a long look. If they could share each others’ thoughts, they might be having a conversation about how Eames ought to stop being such a whore for Saito and Eames could react with that petulant idiocy he has perfected.

As it is, Arthur bites down on his tongue and crosses his arms over his torso.

“Darling?” Eames calls over. “Problem?”

“No,” he lies, that word so heavy that it could crush an elephant. He turns away from the trainwreck he can’t stop watching and takes out his mobile to put in another call to Yusuf to beg him to call back.

On second thought, “Yes,” he announces to the both. “Keep it quiet, at least? I’m trying to work.” There’s absolutely no way he’s about to leave them alone, not after Cobb snuck the children over to maul Eames with small hands pressed to his cheeks, laughter, and pictures of their new family. Arthur had stepped out to get a tea for _five minutes_. Apparently, he can’t leave Eames alone at all anymore.

*

“I don’t know if this is the best idea, Eames,” Arthur warns as they walk up the path to a proper little country _manor_. Eames has ‘hired’ Arthur to come along as his security after a particularly harrowing incident at a clothing store where Eames had several women barge into his changing room while he was naked. Apparently, whatever is going on is still a problem.

Arthur has been slowly coming up with ideas and he’s narrowed it down to a good number of choices:

 _1) Everyone else in the world has suddenly realized that Eames is actually something of a catch  
2) Everyone in the world except for Arthur has been drugged by a unified water source and were then triggered into the madness by the smell of Eames’ cologne  
3) Yusuf **did** something_

Obviously, he’s leaning towards the third. As it is, he’s standing on the doorstep of a large house in England and is already anticipating the worst. He’s watched people who thinks of Eames as family propose to him and almost strip him down – he really needs to keep more of an eye on Ariadne and should reconsider how wily she can be – and now they’re about to visit Eames’ mother and sister.

This is going to be…

“Darling!” an older woman announces as she throws open the door, stretching her arms out and coaxing him forward. “Come here, William, it’s been an age since I saw you last.” Eames steps forward obligingly and she inspects him, turning his chin this way and that and narrowing her eyes at him. “At least you put on some weight, you were wasting away,” she harrumphs, turning her attention to Arthur. “And who is this?”

Eames looks almost _embarrassed_ , what with the way he scuffs his shoes on the doorstep and Arthur is momentarily charmed to the point that he overlooks how this all seems perfectly normal and not insane. “This is Arthur.”

“ _Oh_ ,” she exhales and the way she looks at him and speaks that one word makes Arthur think that this moment is more serious than he’d been briefed for. “I’m Mrs. Eames, Arthur. I’ve got tea on and if I’d known you were coming, I’d have stopped to pick up something from Savile Row. Eames does talk about you,” she says, pinching his cheek and vanishing inside. “Cecilia, your brother is here!”

Arthur warily looks at Eames and realizes that he’s lost two theories – or maybe it’s just the Parisian water that’s poisonous.

“You talk about me to your mother,” Arthur points out.

“You talk about me to your cat.”

Arthur narrows his eyes. “One, how do you know I have a cat, and two, how do you know I talk about you?” Never mind that it’s true on both counts.

“Darling, you might want to sweep your flat for bugs,” Eames admits sheepishly and before Arthur can come back with a witty retort, a beautiful blonde girl appears at the top of the stairs, waves hello to Eames almost dismissively, and wanders on like she has better things to do. “Ah, Celia,” Eames murmurs. “Such love.”

This whole visit has taken Arthur’s theories and destroyed some of them.

He hates it when his theories turn out to be worthless.

*

Yusuf finally contacts him when Arthur arrives back in Paris. He takes the call when he’s at a fruit stand debating what to buy and is inexplicably excited and depressed at the same time when he realizes he’s using ‘what Eames will like best’ as his method of selection, considering that Eames is staying at his apartment while they figure this out.

“Fifteen calls in one day? Arthur, I pay for every incoming call,” Yusuf says, clearly displeased, but sounding impossibly sane considering this is the man who tongued Eames not even two weeks ago.

“You broke Eames or you broke Paris,” Arthur accuses. “Either way. Fix it. Fix it without losing your own mind.”

“Yes, it was the strangest thing,” Yusuf murmurs, as if in wonder. “One minute I was myself, the next Eames opened his mouth and I couldn’t control myself. It was as though I was overwhelmed inexplicably and so in love with Eames that I couldn’t help myself. It faded and I thought little of it. I thought maybe it was a momentary lapse of judgment spurred on by loneliness.”

“It’s been happening ever since. He got mauled on the train to London by a bear of a man. I had to give him my watch so Eames could escape,” Arthur protests, even if Eames had been good enough to buy him a new watch the moment they arrived in London.

There’s a long silence over the line. For a minute, Arthur thinks that he’s lost Yusuf, but he hears the shifting of fabric and static to guarantee the call is still good.

“What?” Arthur asks warily.

“You said Paris. Has everyone been affected?”

“Well, for the most part, yes. It wasn’t an issue when we got to England, but Eames kept his mouth shut the majority of the time…” he trails off when he hears Yusuf give a thoughtful sound at the other end of the line. “What?” he asks again.

“You’ve behaved normally around Eames this whole time.” Now Arthur can hear the scratching noises of a pencil on paper, as if Yusuf has immediately plunged into work. “You haven’t been affected at all? You haven’t become overwhelmed with the desire to make Eames your own? To claim him and mark him and…”

Yusuf does keep speaking, Arthur’s sure. It’s just that Arthur drops his phone right onto the street as he stares at the strawberries in shock. He fumbles as he bends down and picks it up again.

“…and of course, the part where you want to marry him.”

“ _ **What?!**_ ”

“I’m simply explaining what it felt like!”

Well, that explains why Saito was suddenly insisting he would make a phone call and have a ring brought around. Arthur is suddenly glad he doesn’t bring a gun with him in reality unless necessary because he might have had to shoot someone in this case. Arthur takes a deep breath to calm himself down, unable to explain why he’s kept his head around Eames except for the fact that he’s always been the most level-headed man of their group.

“Can you fix it?”

“Some of the symptoms are still confounding me slightly, but I’ll mix together several compounds under the assumption Eames is projecting pheromones in every which direction and causing people to fall under his spell.”

“Are you telling me,” Arthur begins carefully, “that you’ve dosed Eames with a love potion?”

Hesitation. More scribbling. “One that you seem to be immune to. Yes.”

Arthur pinches the bridge of his nose and hangs up. He’s too tired to even hate himself too much when he requests a basket of strawberries after having decided that Eames’ mouth will look best wrapped around the succulent red fruit.

*

“A love potion,” Eames says dubiously when Arthur returns with the strawberries. “You think that Yusuf has imbued me with a love potion that makes everyone around me fall terribly in love with me the moment I open my mouth?”

“Yes.”

Eames picks up one of the strawberries and considers it before considering Arthur for a very long moment. “So Saito trying to woo me, Ariadne trying to mount me…”

“Yes.”

“You trying to charm me with strawberries and sense?”

Arthur pries his gaze away from the way Eames has wrapped his lips around the strawberry and how the fruit has already begun to tint his lips a glorious red. “No,” he says, and he isn’t sure why it’s painful. It’s not as if he isn’t head over heels in love with Eames, but he refuses to let some stupid love potion take the blame for this. “I’m not affected by you.” At least, not in any additional way, he keeps to himself.

“So do you bring strawberries to all the blokes you kidnap and keep at your flat?”

“Just the attractive ones,” Arthur assures coolly and takes pleasure in the smile that elicits from Eames.

*

Arthur takes back every bad thing he’s said about Yusuf. When Eames comes out of a dream, murmurs a groggy ‘well, good morning to all’ and no one on the team leaps forward to maul him, Arthur considers the problem fixed. He’s ready to claim it a success and walk away, but the others have opinions.

“It’s strange,” Ariadne comments, as she helps Yusuf to wind the line back up. “I mean, all of us went crazy for Eames the minute he opened his mouth, but you were practically glued to his side,” she says, staring at Arthur curiously. “And you seemed normal as always.”

“It wasn’t just me,” he says defensively. “His mother was the same as she ever was and his sister barely blinked at him.”

There’s silence as Cobb, Ariadne, and Yusuf all exchange looks. Eames seems to be fiddling with his sleeve and not even paying attention.

“What?” Arthur sighs out tiredly.

“So, his family was unaffected,” Cobb says and maybe Arthur hates him more when he’s calm and reasonable than when he’s trying to tackle Eames to a hard surface. “People who love him felt no need to suddenly make him love them in return.”

“Yes, Arthur, why weren’t you affected?” Eames wonders, choosing _this_ moment to enter the conversation. “Yusuf, why wasn’t Arthur trying to maul me at every turn? I mean, it’s not like my voice isn’t absolutely delectable,” he purrs. “It’s gotten me enough men and women horizontal before.” He enunciates ‘horizontal’ so sinfully that Arthur visibly shivers.

Suddenly, Yusuf takes this moment to announce his ‘ah’ of understanding.

“Stop it,” Arthur warns before any accusations are made. He may not be psychic, but he’s smart enough to see where this is going. It’s not like anyone has ever listened to him before, though, so it’s not like he has a chance in hell of preventing the findings from being announced.

And it looks like Ariadne is the one willing to deliver the final blow. “So Arthur is in love with Eames…?”

Arthur turns away from three pairs of accusing and curious looks, trying to think of what he’s supposed to say in order to justify himself. He doesn’t expect to look over at Eames and see a man hiding a playful smile. “Strawberries and sense,” is all Eames says. “I’ve been wooed with worse.”

Arthur is vaguely speechless at the moment, but Cobb has the good sense to at least get everyone out and give them some privacy.

Eames sits forward and lazily drapes his elbows over his knees. “For future reference,” he speaks quietly, “I prefer blueberries best.”

Arthur is momentarily struck by the thought of rubbing his thumb in blueberry juice and running it over Eames’ lower lip only to have it sucked away. He lists to the side and grabs hold of the nearest table, thinking that maybe he’s just as affected as the rest of Paris on a more long-term exposure basis.

Still, as he stares at Eames in that lawn chair and thinks of first sight plus ten and strawberries and blueberries and sense, he thinks that long-term exposure can’t be that unhealthy for him.

“I’m waiting for you to kidnap me back to your flat,” Eames says patiently. “So that I can do my best impressions of what would happen were I to be under your spell. So to speak.”

What happens next, Arthur doesn’t like to talk about aloud.

 _Especially_ not when Cobb comes in the next morning asking why he’d found a pair of briefs strewn across the chairs.

*

Three weeks later, when Eames wakes up from another supposedly ‘imperative’ drug-trial dream, his clothes are ten sizes too big and Eames has been reduced to a three-year-old version of himself. “Yusuf,” Arthur growls, ignoring the heartbreaking look on Eames’ small face. Arthur reasons that he can’t possibly shoot Yusuf because Eames reaches both hands up to Arthur to be picked up – which he complies with, seeing as he can hardly resist Eames at the best of times, let alone swathed in a giant white shirt and sucking his thumb – and that occupies his arms.

“Yes! Yes, I’m fixing it!”

end


End file.
